U.S. judge orders Libya to pay billions to plane victims

Published 6:30 am, Friday, January 18, 2008

Investigators look over debris of the UTA airliner blown up in September 1989 over the Sahara desert in Niger, killing 170 people.

Investigators look over debris of the UTA airliner blown up in September 1989 over the Sahara desert in Niger, killing 170 people.

Photo: SIRPA, GETTY IMAGES FILES

U.S. judge orders Libya to pay billions to plane victims

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In the 18 years since UTA Flight 772 exploded over the African desert, Ermine Hailey has worn the wedding ring her dead husband, Texas rancher Patrick Wayne Huff, gave her.

She had recently started to doubt that the Libyan government would ever take responsibility for the death of her high school sweetheart, the broad-shouldered football star she called ''my John Wayne."

U.S. District Court Judge Henry H. Kennedy this week ordered the Libyan government and six of its intelligence officials to pay more than $6 billion to the families of the seven Americans killed in the terrorist attack on the French airliner on Sept. 19, 1989, according to their lawyers.

In addition to Huff, the plane crash claimed victims from across Texas, including a Houston petroleum engineer, a Dallas Peace Corps volunteer and a Bellville oilman who was father to seven children.

Each estate was awarded more than $20 million, plus interest, and the family members were awarded about $5 million to $26 million each.

''I'm so grateful there will be a record that shows the high cost for this kind of act of terrorism," Hailey said. ''It can reach all the way across the world from Libya to small-town Texas."

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Arman Dabiri, the Washington, D.C.-based attorney for the Libyans, did not return phone calls Thursday. The law firm that sued on behalf of the American plaintiffs, Crowell & Moring LLP, also could not be reached for comment.

Relatives of the U.S. victims sued in 2002 in federal court in Washington under a 1996 law that stripped terrorist states of immunity from damages.

Libya was implicated in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, that killed 270 people. In 2003 and 2004, Libya paid out hundreds of millions of dollars to the families of those killed in the attack.

'A horrific death'

Flight 772 was bound for Paris from Brazzaville, Congo, with a stopover in N'Djamena, Chad. In 1999, a French criminal court convicted in absentia six Libyan officials for their role in the attack. Libya has voluntarily paid several hundred million dollars in damages to the European and African victims of the Flight 772 bombing.

In his order, Kennedy described the suffering of the 170 passengers. Based on expert testimony, the judge wrote that many passengers likely survived the initial explosion, when the suitcase bomb ripped through the DC-10. They were alive as they fell 35,000 feet to the Tenere Desert in northern Niger.

''All 170 people aboard died a horrific death," Kennedy wrote. ''The many passengers who likely survived the midair explosion experienced horrific terror and excruciating pain ... as they were burned alive and tumbled to Earth."

Kennedy wrote in detail about the lingering grief of the families of the Americans who died.

Among the Texans was Mark Corder, 35, of Houston, who was a senior petroleum engineer with Parker Drilling Co.

The judge awarded Corder's estate more than $22.8 million, plus interest and individual awards to his surviving family.

Corder's wife and childhood sweetheart, Carla J. Malkiewicz, was awarded $26 million. Corder and Malkiewicz grew up on the same street in Indiana. They married in 1982. She testified that she had no memory of a time before Mark Corder was in her life.

The day he was due home from Chad, she was volunteering at the YMCA when Corder's boss called to say his plane was missing. She held out hope, she told the judge, until she was told that the plane was located, and there were no survivors.

She could not be reached for comment at her home in Conroe on Thursday.

Kennedy quoted Malkiewicz as saying the things she missed out on because of Corder's death ''are too numerous to describe."

His brother, Michael Corder, told the judge he has no pictures of Mark on display in his Indiana home. Michael testified that looking at pictures of Mark, the best man in his wedding, reminds him of the crash.